February 2015

New year, new Healy expedition

It's been a couple of weeks since the USCGC Healy has been cruising the Arctic (Beaufort Sea mostly) for Arctic West Summer (AWS) 2013, and a lot of science is being done as we speak. I'm getting first-hand reports from Ben Pelto - glaciologist and glacier change archiver Mauri Pelto's son - a grad student studying paleoclimate who is working on his M.S. at UMass Amherst. Yesterday he sent me this wonderful picture with a polar bear in the middle:

The picture was taken 70 miles off the coast, west of the Mackenzie river, and it shows in how good a shape the sea ice is in this part of the Arctic, where it was actually quite thin at the start of the melting season. Expectations were that a lot of it would melt out, just like last year when the ice was supposedly thicker, but the weather has been so cold and cloudy - except perhaps for a brief one week spell of clear skies - that a lot of the ice has survived and is still blocking the western entrance of the Northwest Passage, which is almost certainly not going to open up for the first time in 5 years (more on that next week). We'll have to see what this will mean for the coming freezing season and next year's melting season.

To get back to the Healy: a lot of interesting science is being done, mainly collecting sediment cores for a research project that focuses on the causes of the Younger Dryas period. For people who are interested in what's being done exactly on the Healy, there's quite a bit of blogging activity this year from the ship, for instance by Healy's public affairs officer, a 16-year old high school student called Alan Guo, and this one by Danny Blas, a teacher from California, who fills his blog with entertaining videos such as the one below:

Comments

A general comparison between 12 and 13 is maybe not in the right thread here.

I’ll post a larger version on the Forum, but for this occasion I marked a 130 km radius circle around Baillie Island/Cape Bathurst to get the Healy position 71.3N 131.2W 27th August at the entrance of Amundsen Gulf:

Healy met the Polar Bear exactly on the extended tip of the sea ice out there.

I might have to quibble with you slightly about the Northwest Passage not opening up this year though. On the southern route a variety of craft have made it through the choke points at Cape Bathurst and Bellot Strait. The most recent passage past the former that I'm aware of is David Scott Cowper in Polar Bound:

We were able to take ice liberty (lower a ramp from the Healy and descend onto the ice) on August 24th west of southwestern Banks Island, on a thick piece of first year ice. We have left the ice as of today and are coring around 69 58.443N 137 14.665W northwest of the Mackenzie River Delta. We are trying to core in the trough around a pingo http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/media/157028/Pingo-in-the-Mackenzie-River-delta-near-Tuktoyaktuk-northwestern-Northwest
,albeit an underwater pingo. As I understand it, when a pingo forms a there is a trough around it--ideal for sediment deposition, so we are trying to get sediment back through the holocene. Our 10 foot gravity core (weighted PVC pipe) succeeded, but our 20 footer snapped at the top and had no recovery--I need to go out now to help deploy a jumbo piston core (60 feet today), lets hope it works!!

Even the southern route of the North West Passage has been choked with ice this year. Several of the boats that made it through had ice breaker assistance. They also passed through open ice fields with 20% or more ice. The Canadian Ice Service only rates the NWP as open when there is a passage with no ice. It appears unlikely that that will happen even on the southerly route this year as ice has moved over the passage at both ends near Resolute and the Amundson Gulf. You have to look at the Canadian Ice Service maps to see the details of ice in the passage, the satellite images miss a lot of ice.

Good video but I would have enjoyed some scientific explanation besides blah, blah, blah. Nice to see the polar bears though and think this is a good year for them to fatten up and have lots of offspring.

Something from the south -
Please see the 500 mb chart with this post -

On August 29th the temperature soared to 32.6°C (90.7°F) at Bahia Blanca, Argentina, an all-time record for the month of August. This follows a reading of -7.9°C (17.8°F) recorded on August 25th, their all-time record low for the month! The site has a POR (period of record) of over 100 years. Their normal daily range of temperature during August is 9.2°C-16.0°C (49°F-61°F).

Really, the Antarctic response to global warming is as scary as the Arctic response. It's just totally different due to having deep grounded ice, along with deep ventilation in the Southern Ocean. It turns out that the main response is that the ocean warms at depth, this brings warm water to the deep ice and melts it, this brings fresh water to the surface, and this stops or slows convection. This makes the deep water warmer, for positive feedback. The deep water (greatest change around 110m, but it warms all the way down) warms, while the surface actually cools. The convergence zone which separates warm and cool water moves north. The scary thing is that this has already gone as far as it has, while all the simulations show that it's really a centennial time-scale response.

The usual reaction is, "yeah, look, average the ice in both hemispheres and it comes out normal." Yeah, it does, but when they both have huge trends and are melting ice quickly the average surface coverage doesn't mean a whole lot.

It's been a while since I had the opportunity to read here, and maybe I am a little off or maybe I am stating the obvious, but it seems nobody is addressing the problem we (I'm Norwegian) see as one of the most frightening effects of the receding ice in the Arctic. That is the dire situation of the polar bears, especially around Svalbard.

The polar bears in the Beaufort/Alaska and Canadian Archipelago areas must have had an excellent summer this year with plenty of ice compared to recent years.

That said - and Neven can speak better to this - the main focus of this blog is really to follow the development in and causes of changes in the Arctic sea ice, and not directly the impact of these changes on fauna or flora.